I’m working from Reading with Tom Canning today, helping with his new Berkshire-based events website.
Taking a website from a raw idea through to a fully-functioning project with content, SEO, technical provision and all the other bits-and-bobs can be daunting. When you get the web equivalent of writer’s block, it can help to step back from the project and talk it through with a colleague.
Get a fresh perspective and push the project through to the next stage.
Today’s work mostly involves getting the website to a state where Tom’s happy to soft-launch it. There are a few technical bits that we need to sort out, but Tom’s done a great job with the content.
Elementor and two meta-descriptions
One thing caught us by surprise with the technical SEO checks – all the posts contained two meta descriptions! Weird. I’m used to reports saying the meta description is missing, but never that there are two meta descriptions.
After doing some digging, it turns out the Hello Elementor theme automatically adds a post’s excerpt to the HTML output as a meta description tag. But that’s a dumb thing to do because most websites use a plugin like Yoast or RankMath to implement SEO meta descriptions.
InBerkshire uses a child theme of Hello Elementor, so we created the following snippet and appended it to functions.php:
/**
* Remove Hello Elementor's meta description into the HTML output.
* RankMath does the SEO on this site.
*/
function custom_remove_elementor_meta_desc() {
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'hello_elementor_add_description_meta_tag' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'custom_remove_elementor_meta_desc' );Flush the page cache… re-test in Seobility’s quick page tester… done!
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something odd pops up that requires a few lines of code to fix it.